Setting Up Open vSwitch with DPDK

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Alright, setting up Open vSwitch with DPDK because who doesn’t love a good acronym soup? If you’re like me (and by that I mean you have no life), then you probably spend your days tinkering around with virtual networks and wondering how to make them go faster. Well, my friend, today is your lucky day!

To kick things off what the ***** are we talking about here? Open vSwitch is an open-source software switch that allows for virtual network management in data centers. DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) is a set of libraries and drivers designed to improve packet processing performance by offloading it from the CPU to specialized hardware accelerators like NICs or FPGAs.

So, why would you want to combine these two? Well, because Open vSwitch can be slow when dealing with large amounts of traffic especially if your virtual machines are running on different physical servers. By using DPDK, we can offload the packet processing from the CPU and onto specialized hardware accelerators, which will result in much faster network performance.

Now that you’re all caught up, let’s get started! Here’s what you need to do:

1. Install Open vSwitch on your server(s) this can be done using your favorite package manager or by downloading the source code and compiling it yourself (if you’re feeling adventurous).

2. Install DPDK on your server(s) again, either through a package manager or from source. Make sure to install the appropriate drivers for your NICs as well!

3. Configure Open vSwitch to use DPDK by editing its configuration file (usually located at /etc/ovs-vswitchd.conf). Add the following lines:

# Set the number of queues for DPDK to 16
local {
    ...
    dpdk_num_queues = 16
}

# Configure the interface to use DPDK
interface {
    ...
    type = "dpdk"
    ...
}

# Set the fail-mode for the bridge to standalone
bridge {
    ...
    fail-mode = "standalone"
    ...
}

4. Restart Open vSwitch by running ‘sudo service ovs-vswitchd restart’ (or whatever your package manager calls it).

5. Test your new setup! You can do this using the ‘ovs-ofctl’ command, which allows you to interact with your virtual switches:


# Add a flow to the virtual switch 'br0' that directs traffic from port 1 to port 2
$ sudo ovs-ofctl add-flow br0 in_port=1 actions=output:2

# Add a flow to the virtual switch 'br0' that directs traffic from port 2 to port 3
$ sudo ovs-ofctl add-flow br0 in_port=2 actions=output:3

# Display all flows currently configured on the virtual switch 'br0'
$ sudo ovs-ofctl dump-flows br0

# Explanation:
# The first two lines add flows to the virtual switch 'br0' using the 'ovs-ofctl' command.
# The 'in_port' parameter specifies the input port for the flow, while the 'actions' parameter specifies the output port.
# The last line displays all flows currently configured on the virtual switch 'br0' using the 'ovs-ofctl' command.
# This allows for testing and verification of the newly added flows.

In this example, we’re adding two flows to the ‘br0’ bridge one for incoming traffic on port 1 and another for incoming traffic on port 2. The output of each flow is set to a different physical NIC (in this case, ports 2 and 3). You can use ‘ovs-ofctl dump-flows br0’ to see the current flows in your switch.

And that’s it! Your Open vSwitch with DPDK setup should be up and running now. Of course, there are many more configuration options available for both Open vSwitch and DPDK but this should get you started on the right track.

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